A group of researchers from the US and Taiwan took home the Ig Nobel Physics Prize for carefully testing the biological principle that as a matter of fact nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds (plus or minus 13 seconds).

A PhD student from Cornell University, Michael Smith, has a chance to enter history books for ranking the pain of bee stings on different parts of the body. Smith selflessly let bees sting him repeatedly on 25 versatile locations on his body, to find out which are the least painful (the skull, tip of the middle toe and upper arm), and the most unbearable (the nostril, upper lip, and shaft of the penis).

The physiology prize: for being stung by honeybees to determine which locations are most painful (the nostril, the penis shaft)

The quirky chemistry prize this time around went to Callum Ormonde and Colin Raston from Australia, and a group of researchers from the US for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg. Don't try it at home, though.

Researchers from Japan and Eastern Europe were acknowledged as the best in the medicine category for shedding some light to the consequences of “intense kissing and other intimate, interpersonal activities.” Lab rats were no match for this task, so the scientists had to kiss each other to assess the consequences first hand, only to find out that the benefits included a decrease in allergic reactions.

The Ig Nobel Mathematics Prize was awarded to Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer (University of Vienna, Austria) for simply “trying to use mathematical techniques” to find out whether - and indeed how - Moulay Ismael the Bloodthirsty, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed to father as many as 888 children in less than three decades, from 1697 through 1727.

"it a lot of work. He had to have sex one or twice a day for his entire life"

Mark Dingemanse (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands) and colleagues took home the Ig Nobel in Literature for discovering that the word "huh?" (or its equivalent) seems to exist in every human language. Wha?

The annual Ig prizes are awarded by the Annals of Improbable Research as a whimsical beam of comfort to the Nobel Prizes, due to be announced next month. Former winners of real Nobels handed out the spoof awards at the ceremony, which also included a mini-opera about the race between millions of species to determine which one is the best.